The 2011 National Transgender Discrimination survey found that, as compared with the population at large, the 700,000 transgender or gender-nonconforming citizens of the United States are four times as likely to earn less than $10,000 a year (pdf); they’re twice as likely to be unemployed; 47 percent of them were fired, not hired, or were denied…

Emile Cambry is a social entrepreneur whose technology center, Chicago’s Blue 1647, teaches people living in underserved communities how to code, make apps and solve technical problems. Cambry’s been inspired by Afrofuturism and what it can do for the next generation of young entrepreneurs. In part 4 of The Root’s series on Afrofuturism, Cambry talks about the importance…

In part 3 of The Root’s video series on Afrofuturism, we get inside the creative mind of John Jennings, a professor of graphic design at the University at Buffalo, as well as an award-winning cartoonist, illustrator and graphic novelist. He was pulled into Afrofuturism as a method of investigating and debating topics of black agency,…

In part 2 of The Root’s four-part video series on Afrofuturism, we get the perspective of Stacey Robinson, an adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Robinson is a visual artist who does work around Afrofuturism and black sci-fi. He repurposes cultural images, historical events and futuristic ideologies and then adds…

Afrofuturism is not black sci-fi. It’s not black fantasy. It’s not an easily definable artistic genre but, rather, a sweeping, cultural aesthetic that examines issues around black representation, the black future and black agency using music, novels, visual media, history and myth to create something else entirely. The Root’s new four-part Web series on Afrofuturism…